About the Author

Sajjad is a Bangalore based cartographer and programmer, building tools to scale the data team and analyze large spatial data-sets at Mapbox. He has been working closely with OpenStreetMap data and technology for over 6 years.

The Reader’s Digest Great World Atlas of 1961.

It’s an amazing addition to my collection of maps. Interestingly, I couldn’t find any information about the atlas on the Internet.

The atlas was ‘planned’ under the direction of the famous geographer Frank Debenham. With involvement of the British and Foreign Bible Society, British Broadcasting Corporation, FOA, WHO, Information Service of India and numerous other organizations and individuals, the atlas is spread out in four sections.

Paradise is somewhere in the far east. Jerusalem is the center of all nations and countries, and the world itself is a flat disk surrounded by oceans of water. So the monks, map-makers of the Middle Ages, saw the world they lived in.

The first section called the Face of the World portrays some fascinating relief maps like the ones below. They are structurally and geographically to the utmost detail that I’ve seen in any of the old representations.